Northeast digs out, bundles up after monster snow storm

NEW YORK -- Northeasterners scraped and shoveled Wednesday after a snowstorm grounded flights, shuttered schools and buried roads with a
surprising amount of snow, leaving biting cold in its wake. The atmosphere was
particularly frosty in New York City, where some residents complained that plowing
was spotty and schools were open while children elsewhere in the region stayed
home.

Allison Pennell said not having a snow
day for New York City's 1.1 million students was "a hard pill to swallow" for her two children, a fifth-grader
and a 10th-grader. "They were very cranky and bitter, but they had to suck
it up," she said.

The storm stretched from Kentucky to
New England but hit hardest along the heavily populated Interstate 95 corridor
between Philadelphia and Boston. Snow began falling at midmorning Tuesday in
Philadelphia and dumped as much as 14 inches by Wednesday, with New York City
seeing almost as much, before tapering off.

Temperatures were in the single digits in many places
Wednesday and not expected to rise out of the teens. It was as low as nine
degrees in Washington, D.C., seven in New York City and Boston – and in Watertown,
N.Y., it hit 37 below.

The snowstorm was the second for New
York's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, and it quickly became one of the first flashpoints of his weeks-old tenure. He initially defended the city's response, saying the storm caused a
worse-than-expected headache when it ramped up at rush hour.

When asked why some Manhattan
avenues, including in the wealthy Upper East Side neighborhood, still were
covered in snow when a Brooklyn thoroughfare was plowed clear to the pavement, the mayor at first said that the cleanup effort was equitable and robust.

Later he said in a statement that he thought "more could have been done to serve the Upper East Side."

De Blasio said 30 more vehicles and nearly 40 more sanitation workers had been sent to the area to finish the cleanup.

Nor were all parents happy about the decision to keep New York City's schools open. One parent, Pamela Murphy Jennings, said her two children
navigated snowy sections of tony Madison and Park avenues to get to their
public schools on the Upper East Side.

"Children have to walk to city bus stops and cross
these streets to get here," she said. "Cars are sliding on roads. If
there was any day to close schools, this was the day."

Schoolchildren had the day off elsewhere, including in
Boston, Philadelphia and many parts of Rhode Island, Connecticut, upstate New
York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, northern Virginia and the District of
Columbia. Federal workers in Washington got a two-hour delay in their work days
Wednesday after a day off Tuesday because of the snow.

In downtown Jersey City, N.J., Kerline Celestin, a certified
nurse's aide, waited for a bus Wednesday to head home to another part of town
after she was stuck at work overnight due to the storm. The temperature was in
the single digits, with the wind chill below zero.

"To tell you the truth, I feel like I didn't want to be
outside," she said.

Maintenance worker William Haskins knocked on doors in
downtown Annapolis, Md., to see if anyone needed sidewalks cleaned. His
10-year-old son, Travis, out of school for a snow day, came along with his own
shovel and an understanding that profits would be split evenly.

"He was up waiting for me this morning," his
father said.

The storm was blamed for at least one death - a driver was
ejected from a car that fishtailed into the path of a tractor-trailer on a
snow-covered Maryland road - and might have claimed more lives. Authorities
were investigating three suspected weather-related deaths in Pennsylvania's
Delaware County, outside Philadelphia; a preliminary investigation showed
weather conditions played a role in a two-vehicle crash that killed two people
in Prince George's County, Md.; and police said the storm may have factored in
a deadly tractor-trailer wreck in Frederick County, Va.

While Boston got only about 4 inches
of snow, other parts of Massachusetts were socked with as many as 18 inches.

Ram Vyas, owner of Towers Liquor Mart
in Weymouth, was shoveling his walkway Wednesday and getting ready for
another busy day after the storm dropped about 16 inches of snow on the town,
located about 15 miles south of Boston.

"It was very busy before the
storm and now it will be busy after the storm," he said. "A lot of
people have the day off from work, so they will be coming in to buy more
alcohol, then watch TV, be with their families."

About 1,400 flights were canceled
Wednesday into and out of some of the nation's busiest airports, including in
Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, according to
according to flight-tracking site flightaware.com.
That was down from about 3,000 flights the day before.

Melody Martinez, 23, who was heading
home to Miami after visiting her mother in New York, went to LaGuardia Airport,
hoping to catch her 9:10 a.m. flight Wednesday, which was canceled. She
initially was told she couldn't get another flight until Thursday.

"I thought, 'Oh, no!'" said
Martinez. "I have to go back to work tomorrow."

Martinez, who works in retail and
attends Florida International University, eventually got lucky.

"Thank God I was able to get on a
flight today," she said.

Amtrak told passengers on its busiest
line, the Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston, to expect fewer
trains. Lines serving Harrisburg, Pa., and Albany, N.Y., also were slowed.

The storm was a conventional one that
developed off the coast and moved its way up the Eastern Seaboard, pulling in
cold air from the Arctic. Unlike the epic freeze of two weeks ago, it was not
caused by a kink in the polar vortex, the winds that circulate around the North Pole.

Nonetheless, bone-chilling
temperatures settled in across the Northeast on Wednesday.

The newest wave of cold air helped to deplete
fuel supplies and send prices for propane and natural gas to record highs. Higher natural
gas prices also are leading to sharply higher wholesale electricity prices as
power utilities snap up gas at almost any price to run power plants to meet
higher-than-normal winter demand.

Propane users will get pinched the
most. Those who find themselves suddenly needing to fill their tanks could be
paying $100 to $200 more per fill-up than a month ago. Homeowners who use
natural gas and electricity will see higher heating bills because they'll use
more fuel. But prices won't rise dramatically because utilities buy only a
small portion of the fuel at the elevated prices.